This Week in NFL Incompetence: Week 10 – This is the Browns

Thanksgiving isn’t until next week but it already feels like Christmas because this Browns season is the gift that keeps on giving. (Keep in mind that I write about NFL incompetence on a weekly basis. For Cleveland fans this season has been a lump of coal dropped in a pile of shit.) After a deadline-day failure to acquire quarterback A.J. McCarron from the Bengals, I assumed that the Browns had reached peak incompetence. And that may well be true as it relates to off-the-field decisions. On the field, though? They still have so very, very much to give.

Dumbest play call of the year goes to Hue Jackson. QB sneak from the 2 with 15 seconds before half and no timeouts. pic.twitter.com/3XMCetOdWG

That was a quarterback sneak on second down, from the 2-yard line with 15 seconds to go in the half and no timeouts left. It was an unbelievably, incomprehensibly, stunningly stupid playcall, which is to say that it was just about the Brownsiest thing that the Browns have ever Browned.

The plan here was apparently for Cleveland quarterback DeShone Kizer to fall forward into the end zone but for that to work from the 2-yard line, Kizer would have needed to be about 12 feet tall. He’s 6’4”. Not to mention that any run play in this scenario is a terrible decision because, if you don’t get a touchdown, the clock is going to keep running and you’re not going to get another play off. Had Cleveland tried to pass, thereby stopping the clock if the pass fell incomplete, they could have used all four of their downs trying to get a touchdown or at least a field goal.1 Instead they ran an utterly doomed play and then the Detroit Lions cleverly (and probably illegally) took their damn time getting up so that the clock ran to zero. No points for the Browns.

At the time, coach Hue Jackson took a lot of heat for calling such a disastrous play but it turns out that the call was actually an audible by rookie quarterback Kizer who – and this will come as no surprise – has previously been benched not once but twice this season for his poor decision making. Keeping all of that in mind, consider what is perhaps the most troubling development after this entire Brownsian clusterfuck:

Even in the loss, DeShone Kizer was gutsy and tough in what was unquestionably his best start of the season.